I don't usually comment on the biggest news outside of
our family but couldn't resist this year. My all time
personal favorite news interview, in the category of "Most
left unsaid" was on National Public Radio's morning news
show this fall when the Berlin Wall came down. They opened
with the sound of chipping, said the fellow was working with
a hammer and a chisel:

NPR : How long have you been working ?
German : Three hours.
NPR : Are you going to keep on working ?
German : Yes.

Lots of folk tales feature villagers tyrannized by an ogre taller
than a tree. When he strides into town they usually hide in their
cellars. Once in a while one of them gets tired of running. He gets
his axe, stands up straight, and takes the best swing he can at the
ogre's ankles. The NPR man didn't understand why anyone would be out
there swinging, or he wouldn't have asked the questions. The German
fellow wished the interviewer would stop asking him stupid questions
so he could go back to work.

Looking over copies of the last five Christmas letters
just to make sure I didn't repeat any jokes, I was appalled
at how many of them had a paragraph about someone in our
family (usually me) getting stitches. It reminded me of
something Heather said a few months ago when I started to
warn her about playing with something sharp; "Are you going
to show me a scar again ?"

We went this year without stitches, although Heather came
close. Last summer she tried to jump out of a swing and had
slid her hands down the chain to the seat when she tipped
over. She plowed a furrow in the sandbox with her face. For
six weeks she looked like someone had tried to give her a
nose job with a belt sander, but now, save for a red spot
the size of a dime on her chin, she has completely
recovered.

Heather is taking piano and ballet lessons. She is a
pretty normal first grader when it comes to timing, skill
and style, but her sense of the proprieties is first-rate.
Her entire class was the chorus for the school musical,
"Santa gets a snowmobile". She told us we needed to buy a
bouquet, and to have Margaret give to her after she bowed.
At the curtain call Margaret dutifully delivered some
grocery store carnations. We noticed Heather was the only
one to get flowers; we asked if her teacher had told her to
do it. Oh no, she said, she'd heard about it and thought it
would be nice. If it's good enough for Maria Callas at the
Met, it's good enough for the third elf from the left in the
multi-use room.

Margaret turned [n] last October. Her greatest accomplishment
this year was learning to wear underwear like big people, instead of
the alternative, which give the seat of your pink bunny pajamas an
unfashionable bulge. Her greatest disappointment was finding out
there was more than that to growing up. "But I'm a big girl now !"
she complained more than once. We used the phrase "big girl" a lot
in her potty training, and she assumed that once you graduated from
diapers you could stay up late, drive the car, enter into binding
contracts and vote.

Our swallows came back last Spring. They raised a third crop of
young this summer; usually we get just two. The third batch had a
problem with mites. I noticed one had died, took the body out to
bury in the daffodils, and noticed hundreds of bugs smaller than the
period at the end of this sentence, in and around the nest.

I bought some spray at the pet store. Came home, decided our big
stainless steel salad bowl would be about right as a temporary nest,
took the babies out one at a time, covered their eyes with two fingers
and sprayed them, making sure to get their tummies. Heather held up
each wing, very gently, so I could spray what she called their
"wing pits". I put the ones I'd done in the bowl, partly to keep track
of who had been sprayed, partly to empty out the nest.

The baby swallows were fledged but hadn't learned to fly,
except for one; he did a stiff-winged glide out into the front yard,
got as far as Linda's truck, found out he hadn't learned how to turn,
bounced off the truck door and lay in the grass, stunned, until I
picked him up, sprayed him and put him in the bowl with his siblings.
Then I sprayed the home nest and let it air for about 20 minutes, put
the babies back.

Mr. and Mrs. Swallow raised a fuss but settled down when I left
the porch. I've been putting baby birds who fall out back into the
nest with my bare hands for four years now, with no ill effect, so
assumed if the parents could see everything was all right they would
ignore what their noses told them about foreign smells.

All four surviving baby birds graduated to adult
swallowhood; they swooped for bugs in the late summer, sat
on the telephone wires like their parents and are now
spending the winter in Argentina.

We took the family and cousins Elizabeth and Steve to the
county fair last summer. I spent most of the afternoon
taking the kids on the rides and telling Steve the carnival
booths were rigged so no one could win anything. After three
hours of arguing he wasn't convinced and I was tired, so I
paid a dollar to let the kids throw three darts at balloons,
figuring one experience would teach better than another
thousand of my words. Steve popped a balloon and won a
painted mirror with his first dart; Elizabeth did the same
with the second. Heather missed with the third dart so lady
behind the counter gave her a fourth, which she nailed into
a balloon to win a third mirror. I hope your entire new year
is as happy and successful as that afternoon was for our
kids.

This is one page of over four dozen devoted to Christmas news letters.
The main Christmas News Letters
page has links to more examples, plus some general guidelines and
specific suggestions for writing Christmas news letters.
If you have an example, either good or bad, that you'd like to
share with the rest of the world, send it to me and I'll add it to
these pages.